VERONA — During their school board retreat, Augusta County School Board Members became the learners.

Their teachers were six kindergarten students from Hugh K. Cassell Elementary School. With Chromebooks in hand, the kindergarten students modeled how they could sign into their Chromebooks, access and complete assignments in Google Classroom, submit their assignment digitally to the teacher, and locate books to read from a web-based site, according to a press release.

Board members were in awe of Augusta County Public Schools’ youngest students’ proficiency with the devices and digital assignments, the press release stated.

Once students completed their reading, each young teacher worked with with a board member to complete a coding activity using Bee-Bots. Bee-Bots are programmable robots designed for teaching sequencing, estimation, problem-solving and coding.

The kindergartners explained to their older students how to plan the path the Bot needed to take and then showed members how to program the robot to move from the start position to the desired end spot, all while practicing number recognition, one-to-one correspondence, and sequencing.

Tonya Coffey, instructional technology resource teacher at Cassell, has collaborated with kindergarten teachers throughout this school year to assist with the integration of Chromebooks in the classrooms.

"The students by far exceeded all my expectations,” Coffey said of their presentation to school board members.

After returning from the retreat, Matti McLaughlin, one of the kindergarten "teachers" commented that the retreat was the most amazing thing she had ever done, and she was exhausted.

Adam McLaughlin, the assistant principal at Cassell, also attended the retreat, not only as an administrator, but also as a parent of one of the kindergartners.

He stated that he was “very proud and impressed with the amount of progress the students have shown since they first logged on in August."

"It is amazing how quickly young minds grasp onto and embrace new concepts," McLaughlin said. As a parent, he shared that he was impressed that his daughter had the knowledge of the technology and was comfortable sharing it with an adult she didn’t know.

Superintendent Eric Bond and the school board members agreed that the lesson was a huge success.

“The exercise demonstrated the progress made in regards to technological advances with instructional initiatives at August County Public Schools,” said Nick Collins, school board representative of the North River district."